From an ancient marketplace in Athens…

… to a 'modern' supermarket.

• Is the European Union a marketplace of ideas as well as only a marketplace?
• Is there something like a European public debate?
• Are political dialogs supranationalized?

Case Selection: Greek Bail Outs

• widely discussed case
• relevant to the whole of Europe

Data Selection: Twitter Data

• interesting webscraping experience
• open platform: anyone in Europe can contribute to it

What can twitter tell us about pan-European reactions to the European governance of the public-debt crisis in Greece?

• What can variation across time and space in the volume of Tweets regarding the euro crisis tell us about popular engagement with the issues?

• What can the content of Tweets related to the crisis tell us about the spread of public opinion on the handling of the crisis in Greece between and within countries?

we pulled together a corpus of tweets

• gathered by specifying search terms & time periods (using modified GetOldTweets)
• adding information about the users who posted the tweets (using twitteR)
• adding locations given by those users (using maqQuest and Google)
• identifying language of every tweet (using textCat)
• translating non-English tweets into English (using translateR)

What can twitter tell us about pan-European reactions to the European governance of the public-debt crisis in Greece?

• What can variation across time and space in the volume of Tweets regarding the euro crisis tell us about popular engagement with the issues?

Descriptive Statistics

• What can the content of Tweets related to the crisis tell us about the spread of public opinion on the handling of the crisis in Greece between and within countries?

Sentiment Analysis

• quantitative methos -> limited